So far I attended 2 .NET Open Spaces in Leipzig and the 1 in Ulm. I did also attend multiple community conferences. And I must say: Again I got a full package of experience, motivation and a couple of ‘navigation helpers’ where to look into (technically). These kind of un-conferences really work exceptionally well!

Topic Release Management: We had a session to share the Dos and Don’ts when doing product versions an patches. People in the session are facing similar issues as we see them in our company: Too less tool support, no common sense practices, too less attention on the whole topic. @lennybacon is doing some work in that area to bridge the gap that VC-systems, build servers etc. still keep open, I do really welcome that!

Beside the tool aspect I could imagine that a Wiki sharing approaches and practices, listing Pros and Cons could help to come to a higher professionalism level in Release Management. There is a lot of noise and cloudy ads on the net, but do you know a resource that really helps to guide with the most basic things in Software Business?

A lot of small talks and sessions were about the non technical aspects of doing software development – communication topics, project management topics and the psychological aspects of working together in a team. I got a lot out of it to use it in my daily life as an enterprise developer and as a (wannabe) change agent. It’s astonishing how open, experienced and inquisitive a group of nerds discusses these ‘meta’ topics, a group that is seen as ‘autistic’ sometimes. For the project management topic: I’m surprised again and again on developer conferences, how deep developers are in the field of agile methods, scrum and the like. Sometimes I would wish that I could say the same about the project manager group.

@sforkmann gave an inspiring talk about CQRS using F#. Ok, I think F# will not be a topic for my project work for the foreseeable future. But each time I hear about CQRS I feel I understand a bit better, what it is, what it’s good for and – that I do it (partially wrong) since some time now. I really learned a lot in this session.

One last note about the community topic here: I really like to see a lot of known faces again on conferences like this, known from the net or personally. On the other hand: Could it be that it’s becoming a more and more closed club of 150..200 people hanging around together again and again? Could it be that topics like Ruby, node.js, monads (arbitrary terms here) keeps some people away? I wish these conferences could provide everything – a market place for advanced ideas, a place to attract new people and a place to build and grow the community.

I really enjoyed my session PowerShell for Developers at last weekend’s SeeSharpParty in Konstanz/Kreuzlingen. I did even more enjoy all the other sessions I attended during the day plus the talks with a lot of smart people.

First of all: Excellent organization of the event – big THANK YOU to Thomas and Alex. Even vegetarian meals were covered😉 ! Lot’s of interesting session discussions, floor discussions and evening discussions. Was really a pleasure (but exertive) to have that for a complete weekend with many competent peers.

Multiple sessions – “Schema-less DBs” and “ORM” – touched the relationship between .NET/OO/Client developers and database developers. I do observe that the data store is seen as a necessary evil when developing applications. My understanding is that it is more than a data tomb to dump some data in in a canonical manner. Multiple challenges we’re currently seeing in mainstream languages/environments – rich metadata, higher declarative tools to solve problems, resource management (CPU, Memory, IO), scalability, distributed topologies, parallelism, dealing with data in a set oriented manner – are solved in these database dinosaurs since decades. All in all a discussion that I would like to continue. It’s too important to use the right tool for the right job – even if 2 types of developers are involved. Finally: Did you know that database people (these inflexible guys with strange ideas…) do also discuss about topics like Agility and Refactoring?

A small session with 3, later 5 people was about “Getting things done“. A good part of the session the discussion circled around how to manage email traffic. Interesting enough as IMHO reading/writing emails is not the core competence of a software developer. We also touched Microblogging in the enterprise which triggered me to put that topic on the table again. How to manage blog reading etc. was another interesting part of the discussion. All in all a topic that could be continued in detail in a future Open Space as we all have to deal with information overload, information filtering and knowledge aggregation.

Some of my proposed topics “Administrative Toolsets”, The administrator as an additionalfurther user” didn’t find enough interest to be discussed. I must admit that ‘client’ developers still don’t have these topics in their focus. But being able to provide manageable applications will be a key differentiator in the foreseeing future. Maybe these topics get a higher priority in future Open Spaces. I should be better prepared to talk about experiences I made, to come up with best practices, to propose the usage of frameworks and tools.